The Specimen Read online

  “I couldn’t help noticing, Miss Carrick, those red beetles in your sketch book. To my eye, they looked quite delightful.”

  “More so than the study I have just given you?”

  “I wouldn’t say that. They startled my eye. They interest me in a different way, that is all.”

  “When a young woman makes a picture of a pretty red beetle, Mr Scales, it is called ‘Delightful’, put into a frame and a husband is found for the artist. When a young man makes an anatomical study of a Cardinal beetle, he is expected to know that it is the Pyrochroa serraticornis, and he is bundled off to university so that he can one day add to the body of scientific knowledge on Coleoptera.”

  “I see.”

  “Do you though, Mr Scales? I don’t want you to admire my skills for the wrong reasons. My work is not bait; I am looking for the truth. In all things.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t intend to disparage your gift.”

  “Gift? My talent is not something handed down from God, Mr Scales. It is hard won.”

  “Of course; I can see that you are very dedicated. My words were ill chosen. I meant no offence.”

  “But you don’t offend me, Mr Scales. If I were a man, would you apologise, or would you debate the talent of an artist as divine gift, as opposed to something instilled by regular practice?”

  “I suppose I would do neither. I would have entered into a conversation about beetles without complimenting the rendition on paper.”

  “In which case, I can tell you that I was surprised to find this particular beetle so early in the year, they are usually out in May, June and July. And it does startle the eye, doesn’t it?”

  “I’m sorry to have intruded, Miss Carrick. I think I have trespassed into a world in which I have no right to be. When I listen to you I see that my own existence is very dull indeed.”

  “I am sure it is not.”

  “I can assure you it is.”

  “Even though you may wish to see yourself as others do, it can never be done, and so I think that you may as well not try.”

  “You seem, despite your talk, very content with your life, Miss Carrick.”

  “I am content to be alive, Mr Scales, but I do not possess the quality I think you must see in me. I am quite discontent, in myself. It has been driven into me.”

  He caught her gaze and held it for a moment with a question in his own, but Gwen would not elaborate further. “The last time I saw you, Miss Carrick, there was something I had intended to say to you.”

  “I beg your pardon? Mr Scales, have you been spying on me?”

  “I—I have been here before.”

  “I must confess I have seen you before as well, Mr Scales. Don’t look so alarmed. I have seen you from afar, out walking once or twice, always walking away from here. I have since then wondered who you were, where you live. I must admit I have wondered what you looked like, too. It struck me you had some kind of important intention to your walking.” She wanted to say that she had thought he looked at first like a tourist who had no idea of where he was, but that after a while, she could see that he did possess some passion in his stride. That a stranger, seen from a distance, could sometimes make an impression on the mind, and could work away to become something of an obsession; she had wanted to admit this to Mr Scales. There was something about his manner that told her he would understand her meaning. The puzzle of the man had struck her from time to time, and she had wondered if an opportunity to talk to him would ever present itself.

  Edward was outdone by her talk. He realised that it was useless to try and broach the subject which could not be touched or coloured by any choice of word. What he had begun was more complicated than he had imagined, and as he listened to Gwen, and saw the uncomplicated manner of her evasion, he thought he understood her more completely than anything he had ever known.

  He could see now that Miss Carrick was quite young; how young he couldn’t guess. He knew that he must move away, that he must leave her alone. If he felt he had made an indecent intrusion previously, this seemed just as bad. Her tact, and the straightforward approach she seemed to have over something he had been unable to rationalise, made him cringe at his own rough attempts to smooth over his indiscretions. And so he knew also that he would come back, in spite of what he had promised her before, in spite of his own conscience. He’d come back again, and he would not hesitate, in his need to speak of everything, and plainly, to the creature who wished to keep her red beetle studies a secret.

  Gwen came to a halt at the south wall of the kitchen garden. A bonfire had been lit and its smoke curled over the wall. She’d smelled it on her way back up from the beach. It had none of the earth or wood tones of a garden fire. Now that she was very close, she could see flakes of black drifting in the air and coming back down, too heavy to be carried far. She walked quickly now under the wall following it around the corner until she came to the gate. No one was there to watch over the fire. It hadn’t been banked down; flames leapt from the heap and parts of its bulk fell away. Its position was odd; she couldn’t think why Murray would have told the lad to make a fire right under the south wall where the fruit trees were trained into their tortured forms. While she was thinking about this, another part of the fire fell off the heap and her attention shot to it. Now that she could see how the fire had been constructed she lunged towards it. Sandwiched in the middle of garden prunings were books; her father’s library. She saw her old friends, Bell’s Anatomy, Duncan’s Beetles, Mrs Mantell’s engravings of Strata and Fossils, all turning back into their base element. She spun about looking for something to help her. A large spade had been left against the north wall. Gwen ran to it, not caring to stay on the paths. She felt her chest tighten with anxiety and purpose as she hauled her skirts in her arms and made her loping strides more efficient.

  She attacked the heap, letting out a yell, beating the burning books with the heavy spade, her striking unwieldy and misdirected. Pages and half-scorched volumes tumbled onto the soil and continued to smoke as she turned to retrieve everything she could manage and then hurl clods of earth at the rest of the fire, still beating and yelling in between shovelling.

  “What the bloody hell?”

  Gwen didn’t stop when she heard Murray. He took the spade from her hands mid-swing and finished the job. “Well, you’ve put that one out, miss. You can have a rest.”

  “Murray—” She had to bend over and cough.

  “I’ll have to have words with the lad. I thought he was a good choice, but I was wrong.” Murray nudged the remains of a burned cover with his toe.

  “It wasn’t his fault.” Gwen gasped, retching, and grabbed at Murray’s sleeve. “He wouldn’t know.”

  “He’s a ruddy, half-witted goose is what he is, miss. You may as well take that as given.”

  “It’s done, Murray. At least I found it.”

  “You did. What’ll you want done with it?”

  Gwen picked up one of the less charred volumes. The spine curved the wrong way and the now partially browned pages spewed forward and then curled in on themselves, as if they had known themselves fey and beyond saving. The leather on the spine was brittle and had bubbled in places to form strange scabs; the gold leaf had burned away in places making the title illegible, but Gwen knew the book by heart. The irreparable damage was sickening to see. She’d spent hours in the company of Lyell’s four volumes, poring over his maps and folding them carefully back into place as she’d moved through his Principles of Geology.

  “I don’t know.”

  Gwen surveyed the mess across the earth and saw two of the other three Lyell volumes. She picked them out and tried to brush off the dirt and still smouldering remnants of other books and garden clippings. They made an awkward stack in her arms as she walked slowly back towards the house, the stink of bonfire clinging inside her nostrils, catching the back of her throat. Instead of going in by the kitchen, she took the long way round and let herself in through the front door.

 
; The library door was closed but not fast. Gwen kicked it with the flat of her shoe and stood in the doorway hugging the charred books to her body. She supposed she must have looked deranged. She regarded her sister; so immaculately dressed, so tightly laced, gathering books with delicate soft hands off the shelves into a wheelbarrow.

  She wanted to move into the room but felt herself stuck there. Euphemia in turn stopped. Neither of them said anything for a moment. Euphemia paled. Gwen heard her mother’s voice very clearly in her head then. It was not, as some said of the recently dead, as if the person whispered into her ear, or stood at her shoulder. It was more a feeling that her mother was in the middle of Gwen’s brain, and that the voice she heard was simply her mother’s thoughts.

  “Of course, I know what he says, darling Gwen. But why should I let him know? After all, he would only do himself an injury. There are some things it is better we keep to ourselves.”

  Gwen straightened her back and continued to stare at Euphemia who had been about to place into the wheelbarrow another book, but now she took the smallest breath and turned around, and put the book back on the shelf. One by one she placed the other books back on the shelves and never met her sister’s eye. Gwen settled into her heels, and as her sister reshelved books she simply watched and waited until the last book was back in its place. Only then did Gwen move into the room. She placed the ruined three volumes of Lyell’s Principles on the wide empty shelf they had come from. She poured herself a glass of water from the carafe on the desk and then taking up the wheelbarrow handles trundled it out of the room.

  At the door, Gwen said, “Have you any idea what I am thinking?”

  “No, because it is impossible to tell what a traitor thinks or feels.”

  “You admit, then, that I have feelings.”

  “And you admit it, finally. That is what you are, you can’t escape it.”

  Gwen went out of the house and back to the kitchen garden. As she bumped the wheelbarrow down the steps, along the paths, pushed it past unclipped bushes, her anger at herself made her clumsy. She should never have allowed Euphemia to draw her into the old argument again, but the previous evening over dinner she had been unable to contain her contempt for her sister’s dogged belief that the fossils in their father’s collection were all remnants of the Great Flood. She had stormed out of the dining room and fetched Strata Identified by Organised Fossils, by William Smith. The book had landed on the table next to Euphemia with an almighty thump and had sent an empty wine glass to the floor where it had smashed. Gwen blamed herself now for having been influenced by the wine. The glow it had given her sense of righteous certainty over Euphemia’s stupidity had given Gwen’s tongue free licence to vent her derision. She opened the book at the place where it was marked and pushed it under Euphemia’s nose.

  “Are you really too stupid to understand what the words say? Yes? I’ll read them to you.” Gwen recited a passage, barely needing to look at the page. The words had danced in triumph—now where were they? Euphemia had tried to burn them out of existence. But they clung to Gwen, and she to them: “. . . organic remains peculiar to each stratum . . .” She pushed away the memory of her jubilance at having committed those words to memory for her father. Of having found herself standing at his desk, trying to talk to him the way she imagined he would have allowed had she been born a boy. It didn’t matter. The knowledge was not his alone to keep.

  Gwen rounded the last corner and stopped the barrow next to Murray. “We have miscalled the lad, Murray. This was nothing to do with him.”

  Murray turned and looked into her eyes, and she returned his hard stare. His eyes flickered as she saw him understand her meaning. Together they set about pulling the books from the dirt. Some were not very badly damaged on the inside and could be saved. But Smith’s volume had received special attention from Euphemia, and Gwen began to find small fragments of the pages torn by hand from their binding and ripped bit by bit beyond repair. Here was a corner bearing the partial remains of an intricate illustration of an ammonite. Every book in the bonfire had been part of Gwen’s armoury, as she had come to think of it, against the blinkered and determined stupidity of people like the vicar who had the intelligence to recognise the truth but turned his eye from it, and Euphemia’s gaggle of black-clad visitors who shunned the truth completely in favour of spirits and their messages from the other side. Euphemia called her a traitor. A traitor to their mother and her faith. Gwen knelt down and let the pain of her grief enter her body; she let it snake through her, probing its tongue into each dark crevice.

  She told herself after some minutes that it didn’t really matter that the books had been burned. They were, in theory, replaceable, and the truth of what had been contained in them, the spirit of them, still lived in her head and in the heads of others. What mattered was the vicious nature of Euphemia’s spite. Gwen chided herself for bringing Euphemia’s desire to take possession of the house to the fore, to eradicate every memory of their blasphemous father who had detained Reverend Sparsholt in loud debate on the steps of Helford Church on the day of their mother’s funeral. “She had her time in Heaven while she was alive.” Gwen remembered the passionate grief in her father’s voice. “Now her flesh will rot under the soil,” he said, “And that is all, Sparsholt. That. Is. All.” And so every trace of his sinful library was to be purged from the house, in order that Euphemia could fully dedicate and fashion the place to the memory of their mother. Gwen saw now that Euphemia was also attempting to annihilate Gwen’s sense of herself, and her right to belong to the place. Euphemia wanted, she could see, to deny the house and its contents any hold on Gwen.

  There was one thing she had now though, which Euphemia did not have, and did not know about: her new friend, Mr Scales. Gwen recalled the fossil in his hand as they had spoken that afternoon. She went over and over their conversation. Parts of it had become lost, but most of it she could remember, and its urgency. The intensity of the conversation had soon eradicated all the usual formality and convention. They had not made polite enquiries about each other’s history; they had existed fully in the moment with no regard for the past or the future.

  Gwen tidied herself up, smacking dirt and ash from her clothes while Murray pushed the barrow of books to one of the potting sheds and she followed behind. Murray left her to it, and Gwen began the ordeal of assessing the damage in detail. As she examined each part of Euphemia’s essay on destruction, Gwen knew that she would never mention Euphemia’s existence to Mr Scales. There would be no poisoning the air with the mention of her, of what she had done, of the way she had made Gwen feel.

  Chapter II

  The Spiritual meetings held at Carrick House attracted a plethora of bizarre people. Like a bundle of strange insects, Gwen thought, batting at the glass in the door, blundering around the dimmed lamps. She couldn’t bear it; she hated their sweaty hands and, in their wide hopeful eyes, that grateful admiration of her sister. No spirits, though, had ever come into the drawing room to divulge their secrets, to deliver their messages or even to assuage some kind of guilt of their own or of the living. It tugged at her conscience, and the knot of disdain grew in her stomach. She watched them arrive. In bundles of four they plopped out of carriages on to the drive. This Monday evening there were three carriages, and two clients had walked up the drive on foot, flapping blackly with the setting sun at their backs. “Pity help them,” she said, and drew the curtains.

  Gwen’s absence from the meetings was enough. Euphemia did not need to be told how much her sister despised her gift.

  And what Gwen got up to in the evenings, whilst Euphemia held the Spiritual meetings, was of no concern to her. Her ladies (and some gentlemen) were attentive and appreciative of her talent. Some, like the Coyne woman, Penelope, came to Euphemia in fear of a loss not yet happened. The tremble in Penelope’s lips was never quite still, always expecting the wash of her son’s far-travelled drowning or some other likely misfortune to be revealed to her in those meetings. Con
noisseurs, some of them, and full of stories about the charlatans of the profession, who performed nothing more than parlour tricks. Euphemia did not have a repertoire of tricks, only an inexhaustible supply of voices, which could dance across the room and whisper into her clients’ ears. There were never any rappings in Euphemia’s drawing-room, nor tinkling bells. She did not have a table with a wobbly leg apt to rock uncontrollably in the gloom. The only glistening things were her clients’ wide and thankful eyes, and after they had gone, the coins in the discreetly placed dish. And most gratifying of all was not the counting out of the coins and the entries in the book she kept, but the fact that she had never once solicited custom. Never placed anything so vulgar as an advertisement in a paper. In fact, Euphemia considered herself more than a little apart from other clairvoyants. On the rare occasions when an introduction to another Medium looked as if it might have been in the offing, she was quick to discourage without appearing ungrateful or rude; though she did often feel incapable of hiding her feeling of condescension. Her isolation seemed to induce a certain kind of expectation amongst her clients. Her talent was unsullied by the riffraff. Like those young girls in Europe who suffered from visions of the Virgin, she was pure and she wanted to keep it that way.

  It was a mixed bunch tonight; too many for the table in the drawing room. Many new faces, which always gratified her. Euphemia began with her induction talk. She didn’t like the way her voice sounded in the dining room but there was nothing which could be done about it now.

  “We must remember to keep in mind the fact that the spirits are sensitive,” she said. “And for this reason, of course, we will only refer to ourselves by our Christian names.” She paused for a second. “There will be no communication from the other side for a ‘Mr Smith’ but a spirit may wish to talk to ‘John’ or ‘Harry’. And the spirits, of course, make no promises other than to speak to you if your heart is open and free of doubt.”